Thursday, December 18, 2008

No, I don't like him. Warren giving the invocation is an outrage, etc...I'm serious, I really dislike him. I dislike the idea of an "invocation" at a state event more. That's the kowtowing to the Christian right that I find most offensive. William Lloyd Garrison would wage secular jihad over such nincompoopery.

So, yeah. I guess I have a problem with Rick Warren giving the invocation at Obama's inauguration. But to me that's like having a problem with the curtains on the Hindenburg. It's valid, but in the grand scheme, it misses the point by a pretty wide margin.

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

I learned today, from Crooks and Liars, that Odetta has died. That sucks. I became familiar with Odetta after watching an otherwise unremarkable documentary about Ramblin' Jack Elliot. There was a lot of music by luminaries such as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, but all I really came away with was a need (yes, need) to pick me up some Odetta CD's. In the intervening few years I've never gone more than a few weeks without firing up some Odetta on my iPod. In fact, she was one of my main sources of study-music while I was in law school. And I did all right. So here's to Odetta, and here's to you getting to experience the magic of her voice and her delivery if you've never before had the pleasure:

Listening to this newly released Nixon telephone tape, I was struck mostly by the fact that Warren Burger's response to cases involving pornography was to "come out hard." Awesome.

But on a more serious note, I was actually astonished to hear Burger and Nixon chewing the fat, guffawing about first amendment jurisprudence, waxing wistful about the regrettable longevity of the liberals on the court.

Maybe I've led a sheltered existence wherein I believed the story that the Justices were implicitly telling me as they sat on their hands during State of the Union addresses, but this just struck me as a little crazy. I've read "The Brethren," so I'm not that naive (certainly not about Burger), but I have to admit, this recording kind of shocked me.